Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Saturday, July 21, 2018

Lee Pitts: Rest in Pieces

If the obituary of our country is ever written, this is how it might read:

United
States of America, July 4, 1776- November 4, 2046. 270 years of age.
The last of the great super-powers died quietly at home surrounded by
350 million greedy, spoiled offspring. She had been in hospice care for
30 years. She didn't die from a Chinese nuclear bomb, election-tampering
Russians or global warming but had become fat and lazy in her old age,
squandering the wealth that generations before had created. On life
support, by mutual agreement the money-grabbing family members pulled
the plug on the greatest experiment in democracy, liberty and freedom to
have ever lived. An autopsy revealed she died of natural causes
including apathy, laziness, political correctness, self-indulgence,
sloth and corruption.

Conceived in
garages, machine shops, farms and ranches, America was born in Little
Italy, the barrios, Chinatown, African American ghettos, in Hell's
kitchen, Irish and Mormon communities, on Ellis Island, upon the plains
and in the great American West. She lived a life full of public service
and proclaimed to the world, "Give us your poor, your huddled masses."

Condolences
poured in from around the world from those who were saved by her
armies, her doctors and her farmers. Foreign leaders remembered America
as a loyal neighbor who always spoke her mind but who gave up her sons
and daughters willingly so that others might be freed from the wicked
rule of ruthless despots, murdering dictators and barbarous Ayatollahs. A
veteran of foreign wars, her sons stormed the beaches of Normandy and
her daughters nursed the world's sick back to health. She willingly gave
her bombs and her blood to conquer bullies like Hitler, Stalin,
Hussein, Bin Laden and countless others. After she'd beaten them in
battle she literally gave the shirt off her back to rebuild their cities
and their economies. During her life she adopted countless refugees
from around the world, gave sanctuary to the UN and her farmers and
ranchers fed billions who would have died otherwise.

With
5% of the world's population and 6% of the land, she produced 20% of
everything man-made on earth. She gave the world Apple, Amazon,
Microsoft and Google, and birthed the tech and the green revolutions.
She taught the world how to farm. Her engineers and her scientists
invented ways to remove much of the drudgery from work, her teachers
educated the world's most highly intelligent, and her doctors,
missionaries and volunteers kept famine and disease at bay.

America's
passing left many unanswered questions: who will be willing to
sacrifice her sons and daughters the next time a global bully tries to
massacre an entire race? Who will give freely trillions of dollars when
hurricanes, earthquakes or despotic dictators leave a path of human
destruction behind? Who will seek out and destroy the terrorists who
want to murder everyone who doesn't worship their god? Who will tear
down the walls that communism built or be a sanctuary for refugees who
have no where else to turn? Who will entertain the world or spawn the
next generation of Disneys, Jobs, Gates or Bezos? Who will say to the
world's unfortunate and poor, "Follow us and we will lift you up?"

America was preceded in death by common sense, decency, freedom, hard work, thrift and good manners...